Various mobile mining machines, such as rock drilling rigs, loading and transport equipment, are used in a mine. The mining machines may be manned or unmanned. The unmanned mining machines may be remote-controlled from a control room, for instance, and they may be provided with measuring devices suitable for location determination. The unmanned mining machines may be controlled to follow a desired route in a mine, provided that the location of the machine can be determined. The location of a machine may be determined by using laser scanners, for instance.
WO 2007/012198 discloses a method of guiding a mining vehicle automatically. By driving the mining vehicle manually or through teleoperation, an operator teaches the mining vehicle a route to follow with no operator intervention involved. U.S. Pat. No. 5,615,116 also discloses a method of automatically navigating vehicles, wherein a route used by a navigation system may have been taught by driving the vehicle or the route may have been determined manually.
Typically, routes are time-consuming to teach since each route to be driven has to be taught by driving a mining vehicle from start to finish of a particular route.